The Afro-Italians shaking up Italy's rigid notions of national identity

After moving to Italy from Senegal at four years old, Aida Diouf Mbengue struggled to be accepted both for her hijab and her skin colour.

She was excluded by classmates and belittled by teachers.

Now Mbengue is a rising internet star with one million followers on TikTok thanks to light-hearted, cheeky videos of herself flaunting an array of veils. Her content, she says, aims to fight against the mindsets that beset her childhood. 

She is far from alone. Mbengue is part of a burgeoning movement of Afro-Italian influencers and creatives helping to spur a rethink of the Italian identity.

African Italians are frequently cast as outsiders in Italian society even though their history goes back decades -- the country had been experiencing waves of arrivals from Africa long before the refugee crisis. 

Yet, according to sociologist Mauro Valeri, this is “a history that still needs to be written". In a lecture for NYU Florence, Valeri presents notable Black Italians that have fallen into obscurity after 1930s Fascism redefined Italians as Arian and Catholic.

Since then, Valeri argues, Italian identity has been tied to whiteness.

But as geography would have it, Italy has been among the European countries bearing the brunt of refugees and migrants' arrivals over the past few years and the political narrative surrounding the refugee crisis has deepened the struggle for acceptance for Afro-Italians.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League party and former deputy prime minister, is notorious for advocating hard-line anti-immigration policies. 

In 2018, the United Nations accused him and other right-wing politicians of “unashamedly embracing racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner rhetoric” to help push through their